“Welch support is so vital,” said Shengqian Ma, University Distinguished Research Professor and Welch Chair in Chemistry. “It gives me the freedom to explore new ideas, with some of that early research growing into federally funded projects on the critical materials which are so important to this country.”
His synthetic inorganic and organic materials research group focuses on task-specific design and functionalization of advanced porous materials. A key goal is to engineer the nanospace of advanced porous materials such as metal-organic frameworks (MOF), covalent organic framework (COF) and porous organic polymer (POP) for energy, biological and environmental applications.
“The space within nanoporous materials provides virtually unlimited room for imagination, allowing designed incorporation of different functionalities for numerous potential applications,” he explained.
Dr. Ma’s current Welch-funded research is exploring how to extract lithium and rare earth metals from water, including geothermal sources, brine lakes, seawater and produced water, a byproduct of oil and gas operations.
“At concentrations of parts per million, it has not been practical previously to harvest these metals,” he noted. “But our approach is aimed at changing that.” He points to a pending federal grant proposal to recover lithium from produced water.
Such task-specific COF/POP-based “nano-traps” also can be used to treat water by removing a range of pollutants, including heavy metals, oil and micro-pollutants.
In related research, his team is developing methods to recover and recycle critical materials such as platinum, palladium and rhodium from catalyst waste and gallium manufacturing streams.
Some other current projects are employing MOFs/COFs/POPs as precursors for the synthesis of microporous carbon materials and nanostructured oxide materials for applications in fuel cells, energy storage, and electrocatalysis, including converting carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere into fuels.
While much of his work is focused on inorganic applications, Dr. Ma also is using Welch support to explore applications for nonporous materials in the biomedical and biophysical spaces. For example, his team is using COFs to gain a better understanding of the biophysical conditions of protein translocation across cell membranes and employing MOFs as a new platform to understand the behaviors of enzymes/proteins in confined/crowded environments.
“As far as I know, we are probably the only group doing this,” Dr. Ma said. Based on early results, his team has two NIH proposals pending to expand the research.
“Welch lets us explore creative, innovative and unprecedented ideas and build the preliminary results that let us obtain more funding. I call this ‘frontier’ research, and it has been very productive,” he said.
After undergraduate work at Jilin University in China, Dr. Ma earned a Ph.D. at Miami University in Ohio in 2008. He completed a two-year Director’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory before starting his faculty career at University of South Florida. He was promoted to full professor in 2018 and joined the University of North Texas in 2020 as the Welch Chair in Chemistry.